Category Archives: Reviews

Just in time for the gift-giving season, here is my “Ten Best History Books about Crime and Punishment.” I want to thank everyone who submitted suggestions for the list: I read some of the books already, and I look forward to reading those I haven’t. Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at […]

Murder and Mayhem in Essex County by Robert Wilhelm (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011), 128 pp. Robert Wilhelm has earned a reputation for writing compelling accounts of 19th-century murders on his blog, Murder by Gaslight. He has more recently taken on a new project, The National Night Stick, which chronicles the oddities and outrageous […]

I am putting together a list of the top ten history books about crime and punishment, and I would like you to participate! Nominations are open to any book that deals with crime history, regardless of place (in other words, it does not have to be limited to American crime history). Books should be historical […]

American Homicide by Randolph Roth (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 655 pp. In American Homicide, Randolph Roth attempts to use the massive amount of historical data that he and his colleagues have assembled for the Historical Violence Database to explain patterns in the murder rate over broad historical time periods. […]

A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States by Stephen Mihm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 457 pp. Counterfeiting was widespread during the early history of the United States. Some estimates from the time claimed that between ten and fifty percent of the circulating currency was counterfeit. Such […]

About the author

Anthony Vaver has broad expertise in the social and cultural history of crime and punishment and is the author of the Amazon.com bestselling books, Bound with an Iron Chain and Early American Criminals. He holds a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and an M.L.S. from Rutgers University. He has never spent a night in jail, but he was once falsely accused of shoplifting.
Contact Me.